By Craig McDermott, cross-posted from Random Musings
First, the part about tolerance, or the lack thereof, in the US.
From ABC News/Good Morning America, via Yahoo! News, written by Alexis Shaw –
A Tennessee school district has cancelled some field trips to religious venues after a parent complained that a teacher was pushing "Islamic tolerance" on students.
Mike Conner, 46, of Hendersonville, Tenn., told ABC News that he felt his 14-year-old step daughter's
teacher was intentionally giving Islam a greater emphasis than other
religions in her Honors World Studies curriculum. The popular elective
at the suburban Nashville school with 1,500 students examines five major
world religions but only schedules field trips to two houses of worship
– a mosque and a Hindu temple.
In
some parts of the country apparently the possibility that children may
be taught that "people with different religious beliefs (or non-beliefs) aren't all wild-eyed terrorists" is the sort of un-American activity that must be sniffed out and snuffed out.
Now, the part about editors, or the lack thereof, in the US.
Using snippys (in case someone wants to claim that a "copy-and-paste" can be altered) –
Aside
from the fact that the statement is utter crap (there is hardly a
"lack" information regarding Christ and/or Gandhi out there), it's "lack
*of* information".
Still, one such error could just be a typo.
Typos happen; I know that I've made share. 😉
Unfortunately, there's more than one in the story.
Ummm…"an" Islamic Center (and
I'm not sure that the capitalization here is correct, but this post is
about using incorrect words; things like capitalization and punctuation
can be addressed another day…of course, the capitalization would work
if "and" was replaced with "the", so maybe this is just a case of using
the wrong word…) and, in this situation, the parents have "objections".
Both
of these mistakes are part of quotes, and I suppose that it's possible
that the people being quoted are both grammar-challenged.
However,
two people quoted in the same story, making the same mistake, and one
of them is a college professor? Doesn't seem likely.
What seems a little more likely is that Ms. Shaw is a truly unqualified writer.
However,
given that the preponderance of the story was serviceable, it seems
more likely that someone assembled the story from notes where the quotes
were written by someone in a rush who wrote what they needed to
remember the actual statement.
And what is not "likely" but definite?
The fact that none of ABC News' editors caught the errors.